UPDATE: The Following section is no longer applicable. As of January 2018 You can no longer load Amex Offers via Twitter. Read more here.
Amex Offers Audit
As you might have noticed, the holiday season is generally a time where Amex goes crazy with a ton of Amex Offers. (Thank god they fixed the interface just in time!) Many of these offers are only available to targeted cardholders, but a lot are syncable via Twitter and the American Express website. (Also via Facebook and other social media.)
Over the summer I covered in detail how to auto-sync American Express accounts with Amex Offers via Twitter. At the time I suffered through the process of creating a Twitter account for each of my Amex cards and then syncing that account. I then setup an automated service to tweet whenever a new offer comes.
There are two problems though:
- This process isn’t 100% effective as we saw with the Staples Amex Offer where no one knew the #AmexStaplesNov hashtag until it was too late. I was lucky enough to be awake and managed to get it loaded to accounts via the Amex website, but many of you weren’t so lucky.
- I have opened up new cards since I last synced everything, meaning not all of my cards are getting the best deals auto-synced via Twitter.
Performing the Amex Offers Audit
While there isn’t much I can do about the first issue, the second one is completely fixable. To make sure everything is running smoothly (and I’m getting the best deals), I performed an audit on all of my accounts and completely rebuilt my organizational spreadsheet from scratch.
Here are some things I noticed:
- 14 new cards (including AUs) are not synced to Twitter 🙁
- Some old Twitter accounts are synced, but to cards that are now closed.
- My old naming convention of using a phrase + the last four digits is failing because some of my cards have the same last four digits.
The easiest way I found to tell if my card was auto-synced to Twitter was to look at the Amex website. Once you go to a specific card on the site, it shows you how many offers are loaded to that card. Cards that weren’t synced to Twitter only had 4 or 5 offers I manually loaded. Twitter synced cards had 30+.
Fixing the Problems
To fix these issues I am creating new Twitter accounts for the 14 cards that aren’t synced. Since my naming conventions were a bit messed up, I cannot with 100% certainty tell which accounts were linked to the closed cards, so I will just leave those accounts alone.
From now on I am tracking the following information with the hope that it should prevent similar issues in the future:
- Last 5 digits of the card number
- Type of card (Product name)
- Amex website login card is assigned to
- Cardholder’s name
- Twitter account name linked to the card
The last columns of this spreadsheet are setup so I can insert a particular Amex Offer and mark each card as completed for that offer as it happens. With a high number of cards, it isn’t always possible to complete an offer across all cards at the same time. Now I can keep track of my progress right in the same spreadsheet and know all of my information is up to date.
Fixing the Twitter Accounts Issue
One other nicety of this audit is fixing the Twitter account tracking. Before now I wasn’t tracking which Twitter account corresponds to which card since I was relying on the last four digits in the name to tell me. That failed, but this new system of using 5 digits along with tracking the name linked to each card should make it easier. Now when I close a card and get a new one I can assign the dormant Twitter account to the new card and change the nickname of the account to reflect the new card number!
Conclusion
Since we have seen a huge influx of fairly decent Amex Offers this past week and most likely will see a few more good ones as the holiday season approaches, I suggest performing a Twitter audit of your own. Is your system of organizing and syncing your cards working? Have you opened new cards that aren’t synced? Are all of your accounts auto-syncing offers properly? It may take some time to keep up with all of this, but for many it should be worth it!
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[…] Related: Performing an Amex Offers Audit: Are You Ready for the Next Storm of Deals? […]
Shawn I used IFTTT but twitter canceled every single one of my 20+ twitter accounts for suspecting me of using an automated program. HAve you run into this issue? ARe you still using IFTTT successfully with the method you previously described?
Yes I am. I ran into a problem initially with 1 account, but haven’t had any problems since.
So you are abusing the Amex offer program and writing a post about it as well. Man do you have some balls to pull that off. If Amex ever stops running this program Im pretty sure we can look to short sighted articles such as this that push the Amex offers with tons of AUs as a highlight of why we cant have anything nice. brutal. Worst part is that you’ll read this and pretend I am the one that is wrong instead of looking at yourself and saying “Hey maybe I shouldnt have made a post like that”
I just have to wonder whether you stop to consider whether you even want some of the offers before you tweet them. If you’re into fashion, $50 off a $250 spend at The Outnet is great. But somehow I imagine that’s not up your street. But are you tweeting that offer, too?
Yes I do. I wouldn’t but there isn’t an effective way to select the offers you want to tweet and automate it. By the time you see an offer it may already be gone, so automation is the best way to go.
Too bad there’s no way to ‘give back’ rashly tweeted offers that you don’t really want, or even to trade them. I’ll give you my Staples offer (since I put all my Staples spending on my Chase Ink Plus) for your Outnet offer (since I may lose my mind and buy that dress).
Took me several weeks to create and sync 35 accounts! Do tedious. Twitter limits you to two new accounts back to back before requiring a phone confirmation… And you can’t use the same phone number.
For email, I use the same Gmail address + card identifier. All the emails go to the same box.
For example:
mmm@gmail.com
mmm+spg1@gmail.com
mmm+spg1@gmail.com
mmm+plat1@gmail.com
mmm+blue4@gmail.com
Much easier to track which one synced and received confirmation.
Thanks Susan. I do the same thing with the emails, although don’t put the type in the name. Not a bad idea.
Good suggestion. Just checked (well, I skipped Serve and all the subaccounts…) and all my cards had the last offer I tweeted out, #AmexPetco, so we’re good to go for the moment.
In the long run I need to do the same as you, tracking the details for all of the cards… Card number + A description (Wife AU 2 My Blah) + twitter handle + email associated with account. In my case I don’t track the Amex login since all my cards are on one login, the wife’s are on one login, so I just need to know the person’s name to figure out which Amex login. I do create a new email address for each twitter account though (well, an alias) so that’s something I track.
I like the idea though–simply have 10-50 twitter accounts, keep track of which card was associated with them, change the card when the old one is closed and add a new one when it gets re-used. May have to move to this approach going forward.
If I got a new amex account number because I lost my card, does the sync follow?
No. You’ll have to change the card number associated with the twitter handle. Disconnect the old number, add the new one.
If you only get a new card due to say the addition of the chip and it has the same number, but perhaps a new expiration or CVV, those don’t matter. But the card number does.
Thanks for answering Glenn!